Project Coach and Youth Development

What does it take to create a program that matters to youth? We consider the issues from the theoretical to the practical through our work in Project Coach. PC is a Smith College program that teaches teenagers to be youth sport coaches. As a coach, our teenagers must inspire, communicate, problem solve, resolve conflict, plan strategically, and deploy a range of emotional intelligences.
PC uses sports as a means to engage, connect, and empower adolescents.

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

In a new book entitled The
Alternative: Most of What You Believe about Poverty is Wrong,
Mauricio Miller makes the case that social programs designed to help poor
people are misguided, and, often, adverse to those being supported. The gist of
his main thesis is that: Our helping
system for the poor is based on charity, on well-meaning outsiders saving the
poor. But the stories, data, and research presented … shows that charity slows
progress. He further asserts that after
thirty years of a war on poverty the social service sector’s primary
accomplishment was to make living in poverty more tolerable for some. As
Miller sees it, poor people are just as able as rich people to make decisions
about how to improve their lives, and that the only thing that they lack are
resources. Throughout the book, Miller argues that if the billions of dollars
allocated by government and private sources were given directly to poor people
to do the sorts of things that they envision would help their situations,
rather than to agencies run by elites who think that they know what is best for
those folks, we would be a lot further along in the war on poverty.

Miller has some very credible bona fides. He grew-up as a child of a poor single immigrant
mother. Along the way, he observed her struggles, how hard she worked to make
ends meet, marveled at her intellect, and was amazed by her creativity. Despite
having so many assets, Miller saw his mother’s efforts go relatively unrewarded
because of one lacking element; money. As he contends, having more money would
have allowed her to leverage latent talents, and to use her entrepreneurial skills
to start a business which, in turn, would have made the life of his family much
better. Yet, despite being a poor kid, Miller, with her support, succeeds in
school and, somehow, goes on to and graduates from the University of California
at Berkeley. He then pursues a career as a leader of social service
organizations designed to help poor people, wins a MacArthur Award, and is,
ultimately, invited as an honored guest to a state of the Union address. Despite
all the recognition that he receives, after a twenty-year career in social
services, Miller suffers from what might be called a case of imposter syndrome. His epiphany is that
while his motives were always pure, his impact on redressing poverty, which
were conventional, was a lot less than what others perceived them to be.

Nine months after being honored at the state of the union
address, Miller received a call from California Governor Jerry Brown who
challenged him to come up with something different, something that might be
thought of as a disruptive strategy
for fighting poverty. After much
thought, he crafts a program called Family
Independence Initiative(FII). The
gist of this approach entailed honoring his mother’s plight by trusting low
income families to find their own solutions for dealing with poverty. As he saw
it, the challenge was to eliminate the middle man, and to connect poor people directly
with the information and resources that they needed to make real change a reality.
While Miller recognized the good work done by social service agencies, he
contends that in the many years we, as a society, have attempted to fight
poverty, all that such organizations have really done is to make living in
poverty more tolerable. He reinforces this point in quoting his mother and
sister who stated: If they just gave me a
fraction of what they spend trying to help me, we would be so much better off.
In Miller’s view, poor people are not lazy or freeloaders waiting for handouts,
but creative, innovative, determined, and
resourceful.

In thinking about youth development, Miller conveys: To get funding for my youth programs I had
to imply that parents were disengaged, uncaring, or incapable. He goes on
to write that: he had to convince the donors or foundations that my
staff — my programs — are what led to the change in our clients’ lives. We
implied or even claimed that without us, without the services we imposed, the
parents or guardians could not make progress or make the right decisions.Yet,
as Miller conveys, this is clearly a deficit view of low income families
upon which social service agencies stake their reason for being, and which
creates dependency in persons who are perfectly capable of determining their
own futures. He describes a vicious cycle that exists between funders and
social service agencies: Foundations and donors want to help
those in need so the nonprofits and government agencies provide data depicting
the families as needy. That in turn reinforces the funder’s impression that the
families cannot change without institutional help, so they continue to fund based
on the extent of neediness, thus forcing agencies to generate data on more
problems with the community and so on. It really has become a self -
perpetuating race to the bottom.

Given Miller’s perspective, where does a program like Project
Coach stand with regard to promoting upward mobility in underserved youth? On
face value, it may resemble the type of organization that he views as siphoning
off resources that could go directly to low-income families. It could also be
perceived as ascribing to the deficit model that assumes that outsiders know
more about what a community needs than those who live there. In short, is Project
Coach just another well-intentioned social service organization that is guilty
of poverty pimping?

In pondering this question, I think that the answer is a bit
more complicated than Miller’s perspective portrays. Things are not always as
clear as programs being organized top-down, as characterized in the social
services sector, or, as emerging bottom-up, from community initiatives. Sure,
it is true that Project Coach was started by outsiders who were searching for a
strategy to help underserved youth living in a poor community improve their lives,
but, it is also true that in developing and operating Project Coach many
people, representing an array of interests and perspectives, are involved. Although,
program directors are employees of Smith College, all part-time staff are
teachers and residents of the Springfield community. Most importantly, youth
play a critical role in providing adults with their perspectives about various
issues, and demonstrate leadership as they add their voices and assist in
making decisions about such things as who to recruit as coaches, which graduate
student mentors to accept, and even weigh-in on the hiring of program
directors. They also help craft and make decisions about how to coach the activities
that they oversee. Parents of coaches and players also meet regularly with program
staff and teen coaches to provide their insights about Project Coach, and offer
suggestions about what they wish to see happening in the future. Additionally,
teachers and principals play important roles in how Project Coach is conceived
and operationalized. The distinction made by Miller of top-down or down-top
organization and decision making is blurred in Project Coach, as it clearly is
a collaborative initiative.

In contrast to Miller’s observation about social service
organizations siphoning-off funds that might go directly to poor families who
know how to use such funds better than well intentioned outsiders who have
grandiose ideas about fighting poverty, a counter case can be made that limited
dollars can also be used to maximize their effect, if used wisely, and with the
backing of those who are the targeted beneficiaries. This has been a consistent
theme for Project Coach in that it may have started as an idea in the
ivy-covered halls of academia, but quickly morphed into something embraced and
embellished by the community in which it resides. School administrators and a
prominent youth sports leader urged us to get teens and younger children
engaged and active on the fields and gymnasiums in their community which were
underutilized, especially during the after-school hours. Along the way,
teachers and parents emerged to support what we were doing and to urge us to
expand opportunities to more kids in their community. Project Coach, at first,
had a very modest program with 10 – 15 teen coaches, and 30 – 50 -- 3rd
- 5th grade players that offered one coach training session, and
two-1 hour sports sessions each week. After several years, community leaders
approached Project Coach, and wanted us to expand the number of coaches,
players, and contact hours that it had with kids. They also asked us to include
teachers in the mix so that they and their students could strengthen relationships,
heretofore, only built on being in the classroom doing academic activities.
With this request came an offer to support such growth with community
development funds. Today we have 50 or so teen coaches and 150 -- 3rd
– 5th graders who participate in academic enrichment and sports
several days a week. Given that large waiting lists exist for participating as
teen coaches, and as grade school players, youth and their families seemingly perceive
value in Project Coach.

While Mauricio Miller makes a compelling case for rethinking
how to craft antipoverty programs, I
contend that his central argument needs some tweaking. As this blog conveys,
there are not only two alternatives to helping poor people living in stressed communities:
Top-Down or Bottom-Up. There are also
hybrid approaches in which outsiders may initiate a program, and as it
develops, others join in and morph it into something that is more penetrating
and meaningful to those being served. Others can be community leaders, funders,
teachers, parents, and, and even the youth for whom the program is designed. Each
group plays an important part in tweaking, running, and sustaining the entity.
Ultimately, the best data to support its value to those being served is demand.
When demand grows over time, the entity is most likely providing something that
people want. Clearly, Miller provides very valuable insights about fighting
poverty, and how social service organization may be more of a liability than an
asset. Yet, our experience with Project Coach shows that the lines are often
blurred regarding collaborative efforts that may start out one way, and subsequently
metamorphise into something that communities embrace as their own.

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

One thing that is becoming increasingly obvious to those of
us interested in youth development is that the complexity of the field can be
overwhelming. While everyone’s goals seem to be in one way or another related
to building a vibrant, happy, healthy, resilient, and self-sufficient youth,
there is a cafeteria aspect to how various
theoreticians propose that this can be done. Being somewhat facetious, one can
go down the buffet line and take a
bit of social-emotional intelligence, some
academic enrichment, a helping of college and work readiness, and a
portion of health and wellness. As
well, most youth development programs have themes such as art, sports,
technology, music, etc. that purport to teach core skills that in some way
relate to and develop critical assets. Figuring out how program activities and
themes relate to asset development, if they do at all, is not an insignificant
issue in determining to what extent a program is contributing to a child’s life.

In thinking about this, I have come to realize that no one
really has the perfect formula for building
a thriving and vibrant kid. One approach to dealing with this problem is
provided by those who embrace complexity, and assert that youth development
work can be best characterized as an emergent
system. In a nut-shell, this line of thinking asserts that reducing complex
systems to lower levels provides us with a distorted picture of how the system
actually works. To paraphrase the philosopher Karl Popper, youth development
work reflects more of a cloud problem,
in that a cloud is something that is dynamic, constantly changing, and best
studied as a whole.In essence, such thinking relates to my
previous post in
which I attempted to make the case that youth development is like the powerful
effects that we see in Blue Zones, or
communities that foster the development of expertise in distance running,
squash and baseball.No one or two
variables can explain such phenomena. But, being part of a community that
uniquely intertwines many interacting variables, where the whole is greater
than the simple sum of its parts, seems to be the best way to describe what is
happening. Taking an element or two from such a community, and transplanting it
to another locale, to determine whether desired outcomes can be replicated
seems like a logical and interesting experiment, that, for whatever reasons,
has not gained much traction.

On the other hand, an alternative perspective, using
Popper’s perspective would be those who view youth work as a clock problem. A clock can be taken
apart piece by piece to determine how it works, and put back together again.
The whole, is nothing more than the pieces. Approaching youth development in
this way would be aligned with folks in the logic model business. They break things down into inputs, that provide support for programs to engage in a range of activities, which, in turn, produce outputs, that, ultimately, lead to a
variety of outcomes. Folks who fund
youth development programs tend to think like this since they wish to know if,
and how their investment is related to whether a program’s activities are
connected to how a kid fares in the future. Economists
have even produced papers that quantify future monetary returns expected for
every dollar invested in a youth development program.

So, is youth development a cloud problem or a clock
problem? My experience tells me that it is both. Limited resources make it
a clock problem as we must decide
what to do and what not to do. As we learn from research design, clock logic will provide us with some
inkling as to what is going on with regard to how our activities affect our
youth. Using the statistician’s language we can separate variance accounted for from variance that remains unknown. From such
a perspective, the process of program development and execution entails adding
and subtracting activities to account for more and more of the variance
associated with producing healthy, vibrant, and self-sufficient adolescents who
are ready and able to transition into adulthood.

Nonetheless, while clock
logic provides us with a methodology for sharpening program activities, it
does not provide much guidance for the day to day stuff that happens which divert our activities from being executed,
as planned, or more importantly, disrupts a child’s life and makes engaging in
program activities irrelevant. So much of youth development work entails
dealing with the unexpected, and being able to go outside the clock in order to
reestablish its significance. This entails cloud
logic. A program cannot function if the building in which it is housed is
on fire, and a child cannot do homework when her head is ready to explode
because of a toothache. Programs and kids are dynamic systems, like clouds,
that are in a state of constant flux. When the unanticipated happens, staff
must be prepared, and ready to throw
whatever they have into resolving the issue.

My
suspicion is that the best youth development programs embrace both clock and cloud logic. Both are necessary
to produce youth who can transition seamlessly from childhood to adolescence,
and from adolescence to adulthood, but neither approach is sufficient alone. This is a message that is equally important to folks
who work in the youth development field who tend to be biased toward one of
these approaches or the other, as well as to funders who are looking for
payback on their investments. By all means, look at a program’s clock logic, but also understand that
the clock ticks inside the cloud.

Friday, February 17, 2017

The title of this post certainly suggests some strange
relationships. Yet, when we attempt to answer the age-old question about how and why we become what we are the age-old
adage Tell Me with Whom You Walk and I
Will Tell You Who You Are[1]
says a lot. This simple theme, and it’s many variations, can even tell us how
long we will live, whether we will be a world class runner, an elite squash
player, or, even, a major-league baseball player. Certainly, this does not
exhaust the possibilities, but illustrates that in virtually any area, knowing
with whom a youth associates, tells us a lot about who he is, and who he is becoming.
This is so because youth tend to acquire the attitudes, knowledge, skills, habits
and lifestyles of the groups to which they belong. Hang out with those having
healthy behaviors, and one begins to acquire such behaviors. Join a gang that
engages in illegal activities, and pursuing such activities becomes natural to
you. Go around with kids valuing education, and you begin to work harder at
school. Swimming downstream is a lot
easier than swimming upstream. Several
illustrations of this phenomenon follow and makes us wonder about how this morphing effect might be leveraged for
our work in youth development.

Blue Zones

If you want to live longer, try residing in a Blue Zone. These are locales around the
world where people normally live into their 90s and 100s. Dan Buettner has
identified seven such regions in the world.[2] Not
surprisingly, people in these zones tend to have lower rates of cancer, heart
disease, and dementia. Rather than having to think about and plan deliberately
about lifestyle practices and choices, as we do in the chaos of modern life,
folks living in Blue Zones simply
engage in normal activities typical of their community. These also happen to
promote health and longevity. The profile includes: engaging in regular and moderate
physical activity; having a purpose in life; experiencing lower stress; moderating
caloric intake; consuming more of a plant-based diet; drinking moderate amounts
of alcohol– especially wine; engaging in spiritual/religious activity; being
part of active family life; and connecting to one’s community. Although the
impact of any of these factors in promoting longevity may be difficult to
isolate, what seems clear is that just living as others in their community do, promotes
general well-being. A great deal of forethought or will-power is not necessary.
It’s just the way people live their lives in these places. Being part of the
social fabric is all that is necessary.

Can the morphing effect - normal daily
activities observation apply to other human activities? That is, how apt is
the adage Tell Me with Whom You Walk and
I Will Tell You Who You Are in explaining the development of expertise?The answer seems to be that just as Blue Zones promote longevity, other
locales where people excel at different things have cultures that promote excellence
in specific activities. Ultimately, what we see emerging from such locales is
that the most accomplished in the group become world-class performers.

Perhaps, the best example of this is Kenyans as distance runners.
Since Kip Keino’s gold medal performance in the 1500 meters at the 1968
Olympics, Kenyan middle and long-distance runners have played a dominant role
in international events. For the past forty years, this East African country of
about 45 million is producing a disproportional number of world-class middle
and long distance runners? But even more remarkable is that most of these
runners come from the Kalenjin Tribe, a small minority of about 5 million
within the country. Why are Kalenjin’s so good as middle and long-distance
runners?

While researchers have been trying to answer this question
for some time, it seems to come down to an array of factors that entail culture,
geography, lifestyle and body type. These elements seem to fit together seamlessly,
producing marvelously primed runners. As
pointed out by David Epstein, author of The
Sports Gene[3],
Kalenjin runners have very long legs, thin ankles and calves, less mass for
their height, and shorter torsos, all of which, makes them more bird-like, and more suited to distance
running. Geographically, the Kalenjin, come from the Great Rift Valley, a
relatively flat locale, found at an elevation of about 7000 feet. Combined, the
terrain and altitude provides ideal conditions for training runners. Additionally,
numerous observers have described a lifestyle where children run, often
barefoot, all the time, including trips to school, home for lunch, back to
school, and home again.[4] As
well, the Kalenjin are taught to be mentally tough by the various rituals in
which they are expected to partake as they pass into adulthood. Many believe
that such experiences develop the capacity to endure physical discomfort, which
is also a critical element of middle-distance and long-distance running. Finally,
job opportunities are few for Kalenjin’s. They can engage in subsistence
farming, or use running, with its rewards, as a way out of poverty. Like other
poor kids in many parts of the world they work extraordinarily hard in their
training, which by world standards is quite primitive.[5] Taken
as an aggregate, one can begin to understand, that being a Kalenjin, growing up
in the Great Rift Valley, is like being in a runner’s Blue Zone. There is little question that training is rigorous and
that those who reach world-class performance levels deserve great credit. Yet,
the conditions that support such achievement seem to be a part of daily life. Those
who excel on the world stage come out of this population, and are simply those
persons whoare on the top end of
this distribution. Lifestyle,
culture, and environment are the driving forces of running excellence.

Other, less well known, variations of this theme exist in
other sports. Why are Egyptians dominating in squash, and Dominicans in
baseball? Having a specific body type would seem to be less of a factor in
differentiating world class performers in these sports. Acquiring advanced
levels of knowledge, skill, and mental toughness would seem to be the key
factors. Several analyses, aligned with the normal
daily activities – way of life hypothesis
explain why and how these countries are producing world-class performers.

Today Egypt appears to be dominating the world squash scene,
having three of the top five ranked professional men’s players, winning seven
out of the past 12 World Opens, and winning the last three men’s
intercollegiate championships.[6]
Although, the country has a rich tradition of playing the sport from their British
Colonial days, it was not until the 1980s that Egyptians started to emerge on
the world scene. This was because talented players were unable to tour
internationally prior to then because of political turmoil, and were, thus,
forced to stay home, training and competing at various clubs in Cairo. An
unintended consequence of this was that younger developing players could
observe what elite players did, to train as they trained, and to compete with
and against them. Consequently, a culture of growing-up and playing the sport
at Cairo clubs emerged. As travel opportunities became possible again in the
1980s, the best of these club youths began appearing in and winning prestigious
national and international events.

A variation on this theme is also found in explaining why a
small country like the Dominican Republic produces so many professional
baseball players. During the 1980s major league baseball teams began investing
in building an infrastructure for the game there. Today, all 30 teams have facilities.
Their intent, just as with their extensive farm system, was to cultivate
talent.[7] Coupled
with an economy in which over one third of residents live in poverty, baseball
prowess took on great importance. With few other options, playing professional
baseball became a goal for large numbers of Dominican youth. From a young age
kids in flip-flops swing sticks at bottle caps aspiring to move up to training
academies where older youth sleep, eat, and live baseball.[8] From
some descriptions, the player development academies are like factories that churn
out baseball players, many of whom are major league prospects. Last season, a
bit over 10% of players in major league baseball came from the Dominican
Republic[9]. In a land with meager opportunities and the popularity of the sport, kids, in
large numbers, follow the path of living the sport by putting in hours acquiring
knowledge and skill at the game, often at the expense of pursuing education in
other areas.

Conclusion

From these observations one
can begin to understand why groups of people tend to take on certain
characteristics, whether these are connected to health and longevity or
athletic prowess. What we learn from such examples is that culture and
environment play a powerful role in shaping a population, and the world-class
exemplars who emerge from growing-up in such an ecosystem. While we might be
distracted by focusing our attention on the most extraordinary individuals arising
from a group, it is really the population distribution, as a whole, that gives
us a window into understanding how lifestyle and culture are the basis for
excellence, wherever we may find it.

New research from Chetty and
Hendren[10], [11] finds
that these same sorts of effects also impacts intergenerational mobility.
Specifically, they show that children from low income families living in low
income communities who move at birth to a wealthier county[12] have
10% higher incomes as adults. They assert that the effects of living in a wealthier
community are cumulative and include such things as access to better schools, being
part of and around more stable families, living in safer neighborhoods,
connecting with broader sources of social capital, and aspiring to and
attending college. Chetty and Hendren’s work also shows a dose-effect
relationship in that the more years a child coming from a poor family lives in
a wealthier community, the greater the benefits. Taken as an aggregate, this is
another example, of how powerful environment, culture and lifestyle is in shaping
lives.

From
a youth development perspective, the message that we should take from these observations
is that children, adolescence, and adults readily take on the properties of the
groups with which they are affiliated. Whether we are focusing on health
behaviors, athletic prowess, or economic mobility, where one lives and who one
associates with on a day to day basis shapes who we are. My conclusion is that
cultural and environmental effects are the most potent factor in how we acquire
attitudes, knowledge, skills, and behaviors. Consequently, those of us involved
with youth development should understand that our day to day activities and
interactions are as powerful in shaping our kids, as are the activities we plan
and implement. As Esmeralda
Santiago prophetically asserted Tell
Me with Whom You Walk and I Will Tell You Who You Are.